The Train to Crystal City FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II By Jan Jarboe Russell

The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families—many US citizens—were incarcerated.
From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called “quiet passage.” During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans—diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries—behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families’ subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.
Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR’s tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.

Preface

Trains are a primary symbol of World War II. During the war, life
and death revolved around the arrival and departure of trains. American troops boarded Pullman cars with signs on them that said hitler here we come and on to tokyo. Along the tracks, American
workers, who saved rubber tires and tin for the war effort, waved their
arms to the troops, saluting them with smiles. Trains led soldiers to
ships and to battle. Women waited at train stations for the return of
their husbands and lovers and kicked up their heels when their men
disembarked. In Germany, more than 6 million Jews were shipped in
cattle cars, floors strewn with straw, to concentration camps.
And then there were the trains that transported people to Crystal City, Texas. Week after week, month after month, from 1942 to
1948, trains with window shades pulled shut carried approximately
six thousand civilians from all over the world across miles of flat,
empty plains to the small desert town at the southern tip of Texas,
only thirty miles from the Mexican border.
The trains held Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and
their American-born children, and many families from Latin America. The Crystal City Internment Camp, administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Department of Justice,
was the only “family” internment camp—on either side of the Atlantic or the Pacific—that operated during the war. It opened in 1942
for the official purpose of reuniting immigrant fathers who’d been
arrested and imprisoned as “dangerous enemy aliens” with their
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wives and children. The length of their internment was indefinite.
Internees poured into Crystal City under the veil of government
secrecy, dusty trainloads and buses of men, women, and children
arriving tired and confused, with tags around their necks that displayed family identification numbers and symbolized that they had
been torn away from the lives they had known.
The government’s official name for the facility was the Crystal
City Enemy Detention Facility. Surviving internees had their own
distinctive terminology, based on their culture and experience. Japanese survivors, who later erected a granite monument on the site
of the camp in November 1985, called it the Crystal City Concentration Camp. On that monument, no mention is made of the
Germans, Italians, and other nationalities also interned in Crystal
City. The Germans, sensitive to the Nazi extermination camps in
Germany, never referred to it as a concentration camp. They generally called it the Crystal City Internment Camp. Some, however,
describe it more harshly, as a kidnap camp.
Sumi Utsushigawa, born in Los Angeles to Japanese immigrants,
was a shy teenager when she came to Crystal City. Her first glimpse
of the city was of whirls of dust moving down a deserted main street
lined with dozens of one-story buildings made of adobe. Before the
outbreak of World War II, Sumi lived near downtown Los Angeles, a center of business, entertainment, and international trade. In
Crystal City, she found herself in the American equivalent of Siberia, as small and isolated a place as she could imagine.
A bus took Sumi and her parents inside the front gates of the 290acre Crystal City Internment Camp. A ten-foot-high barbed-wire
fence surrounded the camp. Guards with long rifles were positioned
in six guard towers at the corners of the fence line. Other guards,
who wore cowboy hats and chaps made of cowhide, patrolled the
perimeter of the fence on horseback. At night, the searchlights from
the camp could be seen across the border in Mexico.
Paul Grayber, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to German immigrants, was only four years old when he arrived with his mother,
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two brothers, and a sister in Crystal City to be reunited with their
father, who was arrested shortly after Pearl Harbor. Paul’s first clear
memory in life was of the camp’s barbed-wire fence. One afternoon,
while on a walk with his father, Paul pointed to a small cabin beyond
the fence where the officer in charge of the camp lived.
“Why is the man who lives there fenced in?” Paul asked.
“Son,” his father replied, “it’s us who are fenced in.”
The popular history of America’s internment of its own citizens
during World War II has long been focused on the incarceration of
120,000 Japanese, 62 percent of them American-born, who were
forcibly evacuated from the Pacific coast after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 9066, which permitted the secretary of war
to arrest and incarcerate Japanese, Germans, and Italians who had
been declared “enemy aliens.” Not only could they be arrested and
held without charges or trials, but their homes and businesses could
be seized without warning. The day before Roosevelt signed the
order, FBI agents had arrested 264 Italians, 1,396 Germans, and
2,209 Japanese on the East and West Coasts. The hunt for perceived
enemies was on.
Virtually unknown, even to this day, is that the arrests of suspected enemies extended far beyond our national borders. Over the
course of the war, the US government orchestrated and financed
the removal of 4,058 Germans and 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians
from thirteen Latin American countries and interned them in the
United States, many in Crystal City. Carmen Higa Mochizuki was
eleven years old when her father, a poor farmer in Peru who made
his living selling milk from his cows, was arrested. The government
seized her father’s assets. They lost everything in an instant. Her
mother, father, and nine siblings were transported to the United
States, under American military guard, from Callao, Peru, to New
Orleans. Their passports and visas were confiscated.
At the port in New Orleans, the women and children were
marched to a warehouse, forced to strip, and made to stand in line
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naked. “Then we were all sprayed with insecticide that stung our
skin,” remembered Carmen. “Since we had no passports or proof
of identity, we were arrested as illegal aliens and put on a train to
Crystal City. During the train ride, my sister thought we might be
killed there.”
I first learned of the Crystal City Internment Camp more than forty
years ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas
at Austin, a young reporter on the student newspaper. One of my
sources was Alan Taniguchi, a professor of architecture and prominent Japanese American. During a meeting, I asked Alan how he
got to Texas.
“My family was in camp here,” he said.
“Church camp?”
“Not exactly.” He laughed. Taniguchi told me that his father,
Isamu Taniguchi, then an old man with a weatherworn face who
stood five feet two inches tall and weighed less than a hundred
pounds, had been interned as a dangerous enemy alien in Crystal
City, Texas.
I met Isamu, who had been an innovative farmer in the San Joaquin Delta of California at the outbreak of the war. In addition to
tomatoes and other row crops, Taniguchi grew almonds and apricots on his farm. The FBI arrested him in March 1942 when he was
forty-five, and in that moment of arrest he lost his farm and everything he owned.
In Crystal City, Isamu continued his work as a gardener, but grew
much more reflective and philosophical. He claimed that during
his time in Crystal City he came to understand that World War II
represented what he called the “beast heart in mankind.” After his
release from Crystal City, stricken with grief and shame, he decided
to devote the rest of his life to peace. At seventy, he created a Japanese garden in Austin with his own hands. It took him over two
years to build. The Taniguchi Garden, a small, green oasis near
downtown Austin, still exists and is dedicated to peace.
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The raw intensity of Isamu’s face stayed with me as the decades
passed and America fought wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere. One day a few years ago, I was in Austin and went by the
Taniguchi Garden. I remembered the story about Crystal City. I
stopped by Alan’s office and discovered he had died. His son, Evan,
also an architect, greeted me. Evan shared his father’s file on Crystal City. The last time I’d seen Alan, he had told me that something
about Crystal City was unresolved: a mystery needed to be unraveled, a story to be told.
I opened the file and saw a list of names, written in Alan’s meticulous hand, of many children who were incarcerated in the Crystal
City Internment Camp at the time his father was interned. The children were now old men and women, who lived all over the world.
The next day, I started telephoning them.
Alan’s hunch had been right. Slowly, the secrets of the camp and
its sorrowful inhabitants began to unfold. The experience of their
internment lay embedded in their memories, driven into them like
spikes into the ties that held the rails beneath the trains that had
brought them to South Texas. “During the war, there was no place
like Crystal City,” said Ingrid Eiserloh, who had been a teenager
in Crystal City. “So many families living behind the barbed wire,
many of us born in America, humiliated and betrayed by our government.”
Living now in Honolulu, Hawaii, Eiserloh agreed to talk to me
after I contacted her. On February 12, 2012, I arrived at her house.
She was eighty-one years old and not in good health. She greeted me
in her kitchen, ran her bony fingers through her short hair, picked
up a pack of cigarettes, and poured a cup of coffee. We walked outside to the back porch, surrounded by black mountains folded into
deep-green cliffs. Ingrid’s breath was quick and raspy. She seemed
glad that I had found her. Time was short and she had a story to tell.